


a house in the middle of the sea

by asymmetric



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 18:05:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3420395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asymmetric/pseuds/asymmetric
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The band goes to an island by themselves to write the fifth album.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a house in the middle of the sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dinosaur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinosaur/gifts).



> so
> 
> as ever i am a horrible, late, terrible person who should never be relied upon to do anything, but here is my last minute contribution to this fic exchange as a pinch-hitter! honestly, i could write 7000 more words of this scenario, but my eyes are bleeding at this point and there is no time left. i went with my giftee's third prompt about the boys recording and ran with it, and i hope they like the end result!
> 
> this should have been up days ago and i apologize again, but i did finish. *weak fist pump* yay. this is only my second ever 1d fic, so i hope it's alright!

Zayn's the one who comes up with it.

They're in a meeting about the fifth album, the five of them huddled around one end of a long table while men in suits preside over the other, ignoring them to talk about figures and plans and timetables in razor-thin voices that threaten to crack into shouts at any moment. The only window in the room is a long slit of glass at the top of the right wall, and Niall watches the movement of the lonely band of sun leaking through it as it shifts over the backs of bald heads and sweaty necks. His tea has gone cold. Louis keeps drumming his fingers on the table. Niall's knee aches in a way it hasn't for a long time.

“Fuck,” mutters Zayn, quiet beside Niall. “We should just go off and live in a house by ourselves for a couple months and just write it. Screw this ultra-scheduled shit.”

Niall looks at him, at the tips of his fingers resting softly against his cheek, at the darkness under his eyes.

“Tell them that,” Niall says.

“I'm just saying it would be better than this,” Zayn says. Niall can see Harry looking at them, floppy and tired over his own mug of tea. They're all tired.

“I think it's a good idea,” Niall says. “I mean it. Tell them that's what we're going to do.”

“What is?” says Louis, leaning over to butt into the conversation. His movement pulls Liam's eyes away from the suits, and suddenly all five of them are in it together.

“Well, we've already written some of it on tour, right?” Zayn says. “So we've got a head start. Why don't we just go somewhere—just us five—and finish writing the rest?”

“Somewhere without all of—” Louis waves his hand vaguely. They all know what he means.

“Yeah,” Zayn says.

“I'm in,” Harry says.

“How about you, Payno? Up for it?” Louis asks.

“Reckon I am,” Liam says thoughtfully.

“Nialler? Up for it?”

“Up for it.”

“Then let's tell them,” Louis says, and really, that's that.

****

They rent a little house on an island somewhere off the coast of Australia. Louis wants to call it “Tommo's Island”, and he protests loudly that it's a good name over the sound of Zayn and Liam laughing themselves sick. Harry is silent on the matter, which probably means he's trying to think of a pun. Niall just stands with one hand on the railing of the back porch of their new little house and stares out at the blue spread of sea before him, breathing in the bright taste of freedom.

Harry stumbles up next to him, soft-footed and clumsy.

“We should've done this ages ago,” he says, reverent. “Third album. Second album even.”

“Are you kidding?” Niall asks. “We couldnt've written a whole album on our second go. No way.”

He doesn't add that he's worried about them trying to do it this time—this is their first time attempting something with just the five of them and no other producers or songwriters, and it took long enough to get management to agree to it that he doesn't want to cast any doubt. They've got two months, and then they have to have enough demos to show the team and round out the album. He's never really written with the other boys a lot and he wants to be useful, wants this album to be them in a way the others haven't.

He remembers one of the last shows they did in the States, remembers standing in the centre of the main stage and taking out his inner ear to let the sound of the crowd swell up in his chest, remembers looking around to share the feeling with the other boys and realizing that he couldn't even see any of them, that they were too far away down the catwalk and on the outer edges of the stage. Playing stadiums was amazing, but after two years he felt drained in a way he couldn't quite describe. There was nothing like feeling alone when 70 thousand people were screaming your name to make you feel like maybe you needed to start doing something differently.

“Okay, okay!” Louis yells from behind Niall. “Doncaster Island! Final offer!”

“Fuck off, Louis,” Zayn laughs. “This is all of ours, not just yours.”

“For two months,” Liam reminds them.

Louis thunders down the steps and bounds onto the sand, his trousers rolled up over his ankles in a way that forceably reminds Niall of the Louis he met in boot camp, who wore Toms and scarves and seemed larger than life. Liam is half a step behind him, tackling Louis to his knees, and sand sprays out around them like debris from an explosion, Louis yelling something garbled about betrayal. Niall bursts into laughter—he's always been easy for them that way, and some things never change.

“Maybe we could call it—” Harry starts.

“Ours.”

Zayn appears on the other side of Harry, and he's not laughing anymore, but something about his expression when he looks out to the horizon seems unlocked, softer than Niall's seen in a while.

“We don't need to call it anything weird, just ours,” he says. “The Island. Our Island.”

Niall closes his eyes and leans into Harry for just a moment. Later they will go through the house and discover the recording studio in the back they were told about. They'll fight over rooms and make a mess of the kitchen and call home to say they made it here safely. But Niall's going to stand here in the ocean air and watch Louis and Liam roll around and stuff sand down each other's pants for as long as he can.

****

Niall wakes up to the smell of eggs.

He won the room closest to the kitchen in the rock paper scissors tournament last night, and when he shuffles out into the hallway in only his boxers he can see Harry standing over the stovetop wearing absolutely nothing. Niall blinks sleep out of his eyes and settles against the doorjamb to stare at Harry's arse. He likes to appreciate the finer things in life when he's given the chance.

It's a solid minute of Harry shimmying away and humming to himself while prodding at the eggs in the frying pan before he turns enough to see Niall behind him. His face lights up, and Niall grins back, feeling a bit like he just got sucker punched in the gut. Harry has that effect on people.

“Morning!” Harry says. “I'm making eggs.”

“I can see that,” Niall says, slouching his way over to the cupboards to find a plate. The whole house had been properly stocked for them before they got there, with deliveries of new groceries coming each tuesday, but it's going to take him a couple of days to learn where everything is in the cupboards.

“Louis and Liam went out surfing,” Harry says, which is about as surprising as Harry being naked. “They'll probably be back soon, so don't eat all of the eggs.”

“Zayn?” Niall asks.

“I'll make some more for him later when he wakes up,” Harry says.

“What time is it anyway?” It's amazing that he even gets to ask that—there's no interviews to go to, no van to climb in to take them to a venue, no schedule to follow. Two months seems forever, spilling before him like an open-ended promise, and he takes his time choosing the best egg from the little pile Harry has prepared, because he knows he has the time to spare.

Harry shrugs, and when he smiles Niall can see the same understanding echoed back at him, excitement burning bright in Harry's cheeks.

“I don't even know.”

Sunlight is spilling in across the floor in wide honey strips, the edges lighting on Harry's heels. Niall shuffles his way down the counter, plate in hand, until he's close enough to nudge his leg up against Harry's. He stares at his eggs, feeling strangely shy, until Harry shifts his weight over and slowly presses their sides together, ankle to hip to shoulder.

Niall shivers—it's cool this morning—and doesn't move until Louis and Liam come whooping and wet through the glass doors.

****

There is an entire room of guitars.

“This is sick!” Niall exclaims, heading straight for a bright black and white electric guitar hanging from a rack installed in the ceiling.

“This isn't going to become your second bedroom, is it?” Zayn asks. He's wearing boxers and what Niall is sure is one of Harry's t-shirts, and he looks like he's still half asleep, all rumpled and drowsy in the best way instead of strained and silent like he used to get when they were trying to record things on the tour bus after four hours of sleep.

It's sometime in the afternoon and Niall can hear Harry yelling something in the recording booth the room over while Louis laughs like a hyena. All of them know they aren't going to start doing any actual work today. They're just discovering.

“Maybe,” says Niall. “I'll have to drag Harry in here and finish teaching him how to play.”

Zayn's smiling at him when Niall looks up, small and fond, and Niall has to duck away from his gaze, something sticking in his throat.

“Do you think we can actually do this?” he asks at length, staring down at the guitar in his hand. He doesn't mean to say it, but Zayn's presence always makes him think and do and say things he's supposed to keep inside.

There's a short silence, and then the gentle pad of Zayn's footsteps drawing near.

“Louis and Liam practically wrote our last two albums themselves, so if we suck, they can save us,” Zayn says dryly, his voice coming from somewhere behind Niall's right shoulder. He sounds close, and Niall has to stop himself from turning to find out just how close. “I know we don't have Julian and that usual crew with us, but that's what this is about right? Us doing it on our own.”

“Together,” Niall corrects, looking back over his shoulder. Zayn is indeed very close, and Niall flushes, feeling strangely exposed. There's a bit of grease at the corner of Zayn's mouth from the fried egg Harry had made for him when he finally dragged himself out of bed, and Niall wants to thumb it away.

“Together,” Zayn agrees.

****

They start working on the third day of their two months, at Liam's insistence. Niall brings his favourite acoustic guitar from the guitar room and they switch location from the living room to the kitchen to Louis' bedroom before they finally settle on the porch. It's a warm day, a slight breeze sending the windchime that Harry had hung up to “make the place more homey” tinkling away cheerfully. Louis has a half-written song that he and Liam had been working on before, and they spend the afternoon figuring out the bridge and the parts of the melody that were still uncertain. It's an easy beginning, and Niall feels casually optimistic.

So of course they're arguing two days later.

“No,” Zayn says. His jaw is clenched tight. “We're not putting that there.”

“Why not?” Harry asks. His jaw is equally tight, and Niall's a little bit distracted by it. “It leads into the chorus—”

“We don't need a lead in like that!” Zayn exclaims. “Not on the first chorus. Maybe on the third, to like, build the sound, but the whole point is the jump—”

“He's right, Harry,” Liam puts in. “It sounds cooler when it goes from”—he switches to singing as easily as breathing, smooth falsetto making everything sound ten times better than it does on paper—“your eyes closed tight—bah-duh-duh, bam, I've got my arms held out, you've got your head tucked down—”

Harry is shaking his head, slashing his hand through the air like he's going to cut somebody.

“I just—I don't think it works,” and he sounds helpless to explain what he means. “I don't...feel it.”

Zayn rolls his eyes, but it's Louis who speaks this time.

“You don't need to 'feel' every second of the song, Haz,” he says, and maybe he sounds a little too disparaging because Harry squints his eyes and shoots to his feet, storming off the porch and inside.

“Harry—” Niall calls, halfway to standing with the guitar still awkwardly clutched in his lap.

“I'm getting an apple,” Harry says.

“We can put it aside for a minute and work on a different son—” Liam starts.

“I can't hear you, I'm getting an apple!” Harry calls back.

Niall hovers for a second, and then Louis is pushing himself up from his chair and heading into the kitchen, shooting Niall a “don't worry, I've got this” look. Niall sits back down, settling the guitar across his knee and nervously plucking out a bridge they wrote the other day. Today is the first time they're attempting a song by the five of them from scratch and they've barely chipped into it. It's relatively rare for Harry to get childish and stick to his guns over something like this (it's way more likely for Louis to do that) and Niall doesn't know what it says about the rest of the writing session that it's coming out this early on. All he can do is wait for them to return and hope that everything will lock back into place.

Zayn rolls his forehead against Liam's shoulder, his eyes closed and eyelashes feathering soft on his cheeks, and Niall watches Liam's body relax at the contact. He wants to put the guitar down and join them somehow, but it feels like this moment isn't for him even though they are less than two feet from him.

Niall's been in love with his bandmates for longer than he quite knows what to do with, but he feels like he's reached some sort of plateau—he can't feel worse about it or fall any deeper, so he's free to watch without his chest doing stupid things on him. He hasn't shown any of them his little notes of lyrics yet, probably because he's not as good at hiding on paper as he is in real life. There's a song he's been thinking on since they got here, tied up in the idea of the five of them here, but it's not right yet, not whole.

Louis and Harry come back from the kitchen, and Harry has an apple in his mouth and a bowl of them in his hand. He offers one to each of them in turn, somehow managing to look serious and sincere with an apple distorting most of his features. Only Liam accepts, but Harry seems content with that, and he puts the bowl down on the railing of the porch next to Zayn.

“Maybe we could move on for now,” he says tentatively (after taking the apple out of his mouth). “I just kind of want to sit on that one for a little bit, if it's okay.”

He's looking mostly at Zayn when he says it, and Zayn shrugs.

“I'm good with that. We've got two months. It'll get done.”

Harry smiles, and when he goes to scurry back to his seat Zayn cracks a grin and gives him a smack on his arse. Niall meets Liam's eyes and they start snickering. Harry tells them they're just jealous they didn't get any “love taps” and then somehow it all devolves into some sort of arse-slapping battle. Niall manages to save the guitar from any damage and gets his arse slapped about three times.

It's a good afternoon.

****

In the second week Harry gets it in his head that they all have to sleep nearer to each other in order to bettter feel each other's creative thoughts. Niall proclaims the idea to be “bullshit” and cheerfully drags his mattress out into the living room with the rest of them. He manages to snag one of the middle spots in the cluster of mattresses and every day that follows starts with him drifting off to sleep to the sound of Liam and Harry muttering together and waking up to the whistle of the kettle in the kitchen, with sunlight pooling in the sheets around Louis' waist and curving around the outline of Liam leaning against the open glass doors leading out onto the porch. Niall doesn't know if it makes them write better songs, but he knows it feels dangerously close to what he wants for real, his boys all around him, Zayn breathing out slow and even against Niall's shoulder.

“I think we could take the harmony right off that first line,” Louis says. It's a Wednesday. There's three notebooks spread out in front of him, each for a different part of the song they're working on. It's one of Niall's favourites that they've worked on so far, mostly because it's gender neutral and could be about more than one person if you decided to read it that way.

“Yeah, strip it back there a little bit,” Liam says. He's sitting close to Louis, their shoulders knocking together. The two of them work like a well-oiled machine, and sometimes Niall feels a bit like he's intruding when he's with them.

“And then put a three part harmony in the bridge—”

“Building up into the five part for the chorus, yeah, yeah!”

“So how's that going to work then?” Niall asks. Harmonies are not his strong suit writing-wise.

Liam flips the pen—he keeps doing that, like he doesn't know what to do without a microphone in his hand—and points at Niall.

“So if we've got you on the melody for the bridge—”

“Me?” Niall says, feeling stupid for sounding so surprised. It's just that—bridges are Zayn's thing, Zayn's chance to go wild, and it's always felt like a special sort of part of the song to Niall.

“Yeah,” Liam says, looking to Louis for support. “We were thinking Niall, right?”

The “we” maybe would've made Niall feel a little left out on another day, even though he knows that writing songs together is sort of Liam and Louis' thing, but today they've written a melody specifically with him in mind.

“So first note is—”

He plucks it out on the guitar in Niall's lap and Niall sings it obediantly.

“Just hold that,” Louis says. “And if Liam does lowish harmony thing...”

Liam squints, one hand hovering up close to his ear, and he sings out a note.

“Lower, maybe?” Louis says, and claps Liam on the thigh when he complies. “And high harmony would sound good with Zayn, and it would probably start at—”

A clear, pure note sounds from the doorway, and Niall looks over his shoulder, still holding his note, to see Zayn and Harry walk in, mugs of tea in their hands. Zayn is, of course, hitting just the right note to round out the harmony, the perfect bastard.

“That's it!” Liam says, breaking off to scribble something in one of the notebooks.

“Tea break!” Harry says cheerfully, handing Niall a mug.

“No sugar for mine, right?” Louis says.

“We're not stupid, Lou,” Zayn says. “We've known you for a while now, I think we've got that much.”

“Tea and then we work out what each individual harmony line actually sounds like,” Liam says, settling back into his chair with his mug. Harry sits next to Niall, fussing at the guitar in his lap until Niall gets the picture to move it and let Harry swing his legs up across his lap. His hands settle comfortably curled around Harry's bare knee and Harry hums happily into Niall's shoulder.

“Alright, slave driver,” Louis sighs dramatically. “God, you won't let us have a minute of rest.”

“I like this,” Niall blurts out. They all look at him, and he has to resist the urge to hide behind his mug. “I...us, like this.”

Liam smiles at him from across the little wicker table the notebooks are on, and Niall wants to die a bit at how happy he looks. Liam's always been an open book, always shown his love on his face clearly, and Niall wants to kiss him so badly he can barely breathe with it for a moment, grounded only by the weight of Harry on him.

“Me too,” Liam says.

“Awww,” Louis says, loud and obnoxious and clearly pleased by them both. “Isn't that cute. Aren't you both so cute.”

“Fuck off,” Niall laughs. “It's good, isn't it? This was a good idea.”

“All hail Zayn, mastermind of this trip,” Harry says solemnly, raising his mug.

Zayn tips backwards in his chair, grinning the kind of rare grin that makes his mouth go crooked and his eyes scrunch up, and they all raise their mugs into the circle.

“To Zayn!” Liam says.

“To us,” Zayn corrects.

They drink deep, and Niall doesn't mind when he burns his tongue.

****

They go swimming on a Friday where the sun beats hot and huge in the sky. Zayn stands with the water swirling around his calves, looking like he's posing for a magazine with his sunglasses and his slouch, until Harry bounds out of the waves and chases him along the shore to wrap him up in a giant wet hug. Liam sneaks up behind Niall and dunks him underwater and when he opens his eyes the world is in slow motion, blue legs kicking against nothing, Louis diving under to pull faces at him before dragging Liam down as well into the cold shock of the water. The three of them surface together, Niall drawing in air with Louis' bare chest pressed against his back and Liam's arms around his waist, Harry and Zayn laughing in the distance. Liam pushes his wet hair off of his forehead and beams brighter than the sun, light shining off of the slick cut of his collarbones.

Niall takes a breath and slips underwater on his own and knows that they'll follow him.

****

They fall asleep one day in a pile on their mattresses, still talking about a song they'd finally cracked that day. Niall wakes up sometime in the middle of the night when the weight shifts and he senses a loss—Louis and Zayn are gone when he blinks his eyes open. He sits up for a moment, gathering his thoughts, propped up on his elbows next to the tangle of arms and legs that is Harry and Liam. They fell asleep face to face, and their hands lie on top of each other loosely between them, like they were holding hands when they drifted off.

Niall gets up and follows the quiet sound of voices to the glass doors, one of them still propped open.

Zayn is sitting on the railing of the porch, his bare back curved sweetly forward, smoke curling lazily from his open mouth. Louis stands beside him, leaning forward on his elbows, a cigarette hanging from his hand. The moon is glowing so bright and clear in the sky that the two of them are almost silhouettes, washed black and bleeding together from how close they are. The band of sand stretching from the porch to the water is bleached white, and Zayn's profile is shockingly clear in relief against it when he turns and mutters something to Louis.

They haven't seen Niall, and he's about to step forward and join them when Louis falls sideways and presses his mouth to Zayn's shoulder, a gentle, certain touch. Zayn closes his eyes and tips his head back, bringing his cigarette up to his mouth, and Louis hesitates, and then kisses him there again. Niall is caught, one hand pressed to the glass door, unable to make a sound to break the spell between them. They look beautiful, somehow dangerous and slight in the dead light of the moon, and he stays there for a long moment, watching Zayn breathe kaleidoscope patterns of smoke into the air and Louis breathe out against Zayn's skin.

He draws back eventually, and moves soundlessly back to the mattresses on the floor. In the beginning they had invidual ones that belonged to them, and had a specific order and people they slept next to. Now none of them can remember which mattress had belonged to who, and they switch the order they're lined up in every night. Niall lets himself fold back onto the mattress and curl up behind Harry, tucking an arm over his waist.

Harry makes a happy sound in his sleep and Niall hears “we fit” echoing in his ears, a throwaway answer in an interview from months ago.

That's what he wants in the end. He wants to fit, with all of them. He wants all of them to fit with each other, for there to be no lines and no end between who and what they are to each other.

****

Niall's in the kitchen the next morning, staring at the kettle and the five cups lined up next to it. He's automatically prepared them all for the other boys already based on what they like in theirs, and he's just waiting for the water to boil. Zayn and Harry are still asleep, and Liam and Louis were gone off surfing when Niall woke up. He's prepared everybody's cups anyway, and he doesn't know what to do with himself.

“Morning, Nialler!”

Louis saunters into the room, and Niall can't look at him. He grunts in response. He feels tired, in a way he hasn't since he looked out the plane window and saw this little island floating in the ocean below. He feels like he's fallen off of his comfortable plateau and into some sort of bottomless pit.

“Grumpy?” Louis asks, jostling up beside him. He smells like the sea, crisp salt and something indescribeable, something like freedom, painted along his bare skin. Niall can't stand the press of it on his shoulder and can't make himself move away. You and Zayn, he wants to ask. Is. Is that. Is that a. Is there room for me? For the rest of us?

“Aww,” says Louis, genuinely pleased. “First cup in the line is mine, isn't it?”

Niall catches his eye and Louis grins and Niall lurches forward and kisses him.

The kettle goes off, screaming urgently, and Louis sucks in a shock of air, lips open and stiff against Niall's. Niall pulls back as quickly as he went in, panic making crazy shapes in his stomach, but he doesn't even have time to process what just happened before Louis is sliding a hand into his hair and pulling him back in.

Niall's eyes fall closed. The kettle is still going off, and Niall can barely hear it over the rush in his ears. Louis kisses hard, like he's got something to prove, and Niall opens his mouth to it because some things never change and he's always been easy for this band.

There's a clatter behind them and the kettle falls silent. They break apart and Niall's brain gets a little stuck on the wet shine of Louis' mouth before he realizes that Louis is looking at something over his shoulder.

Liam is holding the kettle, and he's staring, his face blank except for a blush high on his cheeks. Niall has to stamp down the instinctive urge to apologize—Liam isn't even the one Louis was cuddled up to last night, so it doesn't really make sense. He wonders, crazily, if Liam liked what he just saw.

“Sorry,” Liam says. “Uh. Morning.” He raises the kettle. “Tea?”

Louis' hand drops from Niall's hair and settles on his neck. He's still looking at Liam.

“Right,” he says, clearing his throat. “Tea sounds good.”

****

They're laying down some vocals in the recording booth that day to finish off something they've been working on for the past few days, and Harry is up. The booth is a proper getup, with a glass door and window between the room with the sound boards and controls and the actual recording area. Louis has to press a button on the control panel so Harry can hear him while he's in the studio, and when he found that out in the first week he kept abusing it and shouting rude things in middle of them trying to record.

Now he flicks it on as Harry slips the headphones on and says, “We're just doing the very last chorus of 'Ocean Eyes', where you trail off alone at the end, okay?”

Harry sends them a thumbs up through the glass, and Niall can't help but grin at him. He has a distant feeling that he should be freaked out, or worried that something horrible is going to happen, but this morning he kissed Louis and the four of them are still crowded up close in the booth to watch Harry sing, Liam pressing into him on one side and Zayn's arm slung around his shoulder. Everything is insane, and it feels like there are bubbles in his chest, like he's going to overflow from everything he feels.

They have Harry sing through it four times, and on the fourth something seems to break loose from Harry's chest, an unearthly sort of cry soaring off of the last note of the chorus and trickling into the next line, whisper thin and soft. Harry's eyes are closed, his head kicking back to reach for the note, and Niall can feel the knowledge that something great just happened shake through the whole booth.

Zayn reaches for the switch to talk to Harry through the glass the second Harry takes the headphones off.

“That was sick, mate!” he says excitedly. “That was seriously great.”

“Really?” Harry yells, his face lighting up.

“Yeah!” Niall chimes in. “I could fucking kiss you, you sounded awesome!”

It's a joke. He means it as a joke. But in the seconds after he says it he can feel Liam and Louis looking at him, and he's drawn helplessly by their gaze. Liam's not the open book Niall always thought he was, because Niall still can't read his face, but Louis has something calculating in the upwards twist of his lips.

“Why don't you?” Louis says, and somehow it's clear that it's not a question. “Harry did good. Why don't you go give him a kiss.”

Niall's always done well with an order.

His legs underneath him feel like jello, and his fingers don't quite remember how to turn doorknobs, but he gets the glass door open somehow. Permission has unlocked something liquid in his veins, and he is on fire.

“What was that last thing you guys said?” Harry asks, turning to him with a smile wide enough to puncture dimples in his cheeks. “I missed that bit, I think—”

Two steps and Niall's across the room, taking Harry's face in his hands and pulling him down into a kiss. Harry makes a tiny, surprised sound, and Niall twists their mouths together until Harry softens all at once and opens up to it. There are hands at Niall's waist, flexing and digging in, and Harry—Harry is loud when he kisses, whining and sighing into Niall's mouth, chasing him when he tries to pull back enough to slow it down.

There's a loud whoop from over the PA system, and when Niall finally pulls away from Harry and looks over, Zayn is clapping, shocked and delighted all at once. Liam's face is in his hands, and Louis looks like he couldn't be more pleased. Niall's cheeks burn, and when he glances back at Harry he's gazing at Niall with the corner of his mouth pulled up into the most dazed smile Niall's ever seen on his face.

They're all looking at him and they're all together and Niall could shake apart from how happy he is.

****

They've been on the island for a month and a half and Niall has finished the song he thought of at the very beginning. It's a Thursday, and Niall stands at the glass doors and watches the waves while Liam wakes Zayn up with kisses tagged across the span of his shoulders. Harry makes eggs, like the very first morning, and Louis makes the tea, their arms overlapping in the kitchen. They all warm up their voices standing on the porch and singing scales into the wind, and when Harry starts trying to convince them that they should do yoga before recording, Zayn kisses him until he forgets it.

They have only one part of Niall's song left to sing—the ending, the same two lines building to a crescendo. Niall recorded the guitar for it the other day—acoustic and soft, ebbing and flowing against the ears like waves. A lot of the stuff they record in these two months will be revamped with offical band backup, but Niall will fight to the death for the version of this song that was made here, on this island, with only them.

They stand in a circle around one mic, headphones on. Liam lets them know when the mic is live and counts them in, and then they're singing, all together.

“So come with me to a house in the middle of the sea, and together we'll rewrite the definition of free.”

Their eyes are all open and they're in unison, chanting more than singing.

“So come with me to a house in the middle of the sea, and together we'll rewrite the definition of free.”

Niall doesn't know which of them starts smiling first, or whether any of them ever weren't, but they're all grinning round at each other, swaying in time. There's no drums, but there's a beat somehow between them, a heartbeat running through the room and synching them up.

“So come with me to a house in the middle of the sea, and together we'll rewrite the definition of free.”

Zayn's hand is wrapped around Niall's wrist, and on his other side Liam is leaning into him heavily, bouncing up and down. The music swells, drawing Niall up onto his toes, and it hooks something in his chest, ripping him wide open and spilling everything in him out into the song.

They sing.

“So come with me to a house in the middle of the sea, and together, together, together, together, we'll rewrite what they said love can be.”

****

It's their best album yet.

**Author's Note:**

> if by chance you also like 5sos, come say hi to me on tumblr at [asymmetricboys](http://asymmetricboys.tumblr.com)


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